Nikkei’s Rally Not Driven by Fundamentals

A huge shift towards Japan stocks by the public pension fund, coupled with measures from the BOJ has further underpinned the rally, but those gains have raised concerns among some analysts.

In October, the BOJ said it would triple annual purchases of Exchange Trade Funds and Japanese real-estate investment trusts. In January alone, it spent 344 billion yen ($2.89 billion) on ETFs, according to central bank data.

The combined flood of liquidity, from “overseas investors and the artificial floor set by the GPIF and the BOJ, which buy on any dip” have helped Tokyo stock markets perform well, said Mizuho Securities’ chief market economist Yasunari Ueno.

However, that has raised concerns the Nikkei is in bubble territory.

“The fundamentals don’t support the prices anymore,” said Mizuho’s Ueno. “Stock and bond prices cannot rise together for long if the market are behaving normally and pricing in fundamentals,” he said. In a “normal” market, positive economic data would prompt investors to buy stocks and sell bonds, he pointed out.

But of late, investors have been buying stocks and government bonds: the yield on the 10-year Japanese government bonds have fallen by 8.29 percent over the past five days, to 0.375 percent. Bond yields move in inverse to the price.

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Alfonso Esparza specializes in macro forex strategies for North American and major currency pairs. Upon joining OANDA in 2007, Alfonso Esparza established the MarketPulseFX blog and he has since written extensively about central banks and global economic and political trends. Alfonso has also worked as a professional currency
trader focused on North America and emerging markets. He has been published by The MarketWatch, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail, and he also appears regularly as a guest commentator on networks including Bloomberg and BNN. He holds a finance degree from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM) and an MBA with a specialization on financial engineering and marketing from the University of Toronto.

MarketPulse is a forex, commodities, and global indices analysis, and forex news site providing timely and accurate information on major economic trends, technical analysis, and worldwide events that impact different asset classes and investors.

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